The present invention is directed towards recovering stolen vehicles, and more particularly towards identifying a stolen vehicle in the public space.
Automobile theft is a leading cause of loss among the insurance industry, costing consumers more than $7.5 billion per year. The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) reported in 2001 that an estimated 5 million vehicles are stolen worldwide each year. Approximately 1.2 million of those vehicles were stolen in the United States alone or one every 25 seconds. In other words one out of every 170 registered vehicles in the United States is stolen every year.
Vehicles are stolen for a variety of reasons, for example, for their parts, to be exported to a foreign country, or to be used in the commission of other crimes. In the United States stolen vehicles are recovered approximately 65% of the time. Over the past decade this rate has steadily declined, as car theft has become a major focus of organized crime. If car theft were a legitimate business it would rank in the top 60 of the nations largest businesses.
Vehicle theft is not just a property crime. To many people, the theft of a vehicle has a major impact on their lives. It affects them beyond the loss of vehicle. Often, they feel victimized and vulnerable, while at the same time they must cope with the inconvenience, time-consuming, and costly process of recovering or replacing their stolen vehicle.
With the advent of vehicle tracking systems, such as LOJACK® and ONSTAR®, car thieves have changed their practices in handling vehicles they have recently stolen. In areas where LOJACK® is available, thieves will often steel a vehicle and take it to a location away from their base of operations, park the car and wait. After the vehicle has sat for a couple of days, the thieves return to the car and take it wherever they had intended to when the vehicle was originally stolen. A primary reason car thieves use a “park and wait” approach is to ensure that the vehicle just stolen does not have a tracking system, which could alert law enforcement to the criminals' base of operations. If the vehicle is still in the location where the thieves left it, the thief assumes the vehicle most likely does not have a tracking device, and is therefore a clean car.
Law enforcement officers, and police departments can only dedicate so much of their time and resources to tracking down stolen vehicles. In large cities with high crime rates, such as New Orleans, La., law enforcement officers have to deal with a vast number of crimes, many of which are more violent in nature than car theft, such as murder and rape. A law enforcement officer, while on a routine patrol in an area may pass a number of stolen vehicles parked on the street, or driving down the street. Unless the officer has a photographic memory he may not even realize that the vehicle he has just encountered is in fact stolen.
Therefore a system is needed to alert the officer that a stolen vehicle is in the vicinity of the officer. Furthermore, as vehicle tracking is not available in all areas, an is an expensive option a system is needed that will improve the likelihood of recovering a stolen vehicle even if the vehicle is not fitted with a tracking system.